A Violent Country
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 18/Feb/2011 11:41, 34 days ago
What are the stereotypes of Africa? Dangerous? Poor? Violent?Laura dropped her purse outside the front of the house last week. It is small but multi-coloured and sat for an evening, all night and then much of the following morning before we discovered it untouched and still containing the fifteen cedis inside. The road is busy with pedestrians, especially as it is near the bore-hole. Dozens of people must have walked past.Laura also has a habit of forgetting to lock the car and leaving it outside the front gate on the road. On the five or six occasions she has done so, we have gone out the following morning to find the car untouched.Laura walks the dog in the evening, often as it is getting dark. She strolls around the neighbourhood, through narrow paths and across a lonely football field. Groups of tall young lads, many from the local senior high school, pass her down darkened alleys and bid her a polite“good evening”. Being an unusual white woman, men stare at her as she walks past in the evening gloom before breaking out in a smile, waving and bidding her a “welcome”. In the seventeen months we have been in Ghana, I have never witnessed a fight or violence of any kind. I don’t worry about Laura walking around alone in the evening at all.Laura has seen a few fights. Two were on the most violent day of the year - Valentine’s Day. The other was at her veterinary office. In all cases, passers by stepped in to break up the fight.There was a fight between two drunken people near Culture’s house the other day, he told me. He stepped in with a friend and broke up the fight. He sounded shocked as he recounted the incident. It was an unusual occurrence.There was a fight between ten drunken people when I stepped off the train at Caterham station after an evening out. Just a few days before Christmas, it seemed that peace and goodwill had been forgotten. A group of men stood yelling at each other outside the hairdressers that my grandmother used to visit. Unlike Culture, I decided to walk past until I saw a man getting kicked in the head. Caterham has always been my home. It was just around the corner from my parents’ house. How could I just let someone get kicked in the head? I walked up to the altercation and asked the man why he needed to kick someone in the head. He was very drunk and very angry but was unable to articulate why he was angry. He was not a kid – he looked in his late thirties, short, baldand skinny. I asked the man who had been kicked in the head if he was alright. He was a similar age, tall, more stocky and dark haired. He looked a little dazed and quite drunk but stood up tentatively. Each individual had four or five friends, all drunk and totally unhelpful. I went back to baldyand his mates. I tried to explain to him why violence is counter-productive and particularly undesirable so soon before Christmas. He listened to me, told me to fuck off, grabbed my warm hat and threw it in the road. He told me it was none of my business but I explained that Caterham was my home andtherefore it is my business. I politely asked him to go home. I appealed to his friends who seemed to agree. They started dragging him away but, at that moment, the dark-haired-man, who had presumably recovered from his head kicking, launched a very slow and badly aimed fist at baldy over my shoulder. The shouting and posturing resumed. I walked off and called the police. They told me they were on their way and that several other people had already called.I had been back in England for less than one week and had seen more violence on the streets of sleepy Caterham than I had in a year and a half in supposedly dangerous and violent Africa. My mother told me that I shouldn’t have got involved. Maybe, she said, one of them could have had a knife. The incident confused me. I thought about what had happened for a long time. Why should I be scared of trying to break up a fight in my own home town? The idea of being knifed in Bolga has never crossed my mind - the idea is ridiculous. The idea of being knifed in Caterham has always seemed equally ridiculous. What factors have led to my mother being so fearful of knife crime, even in Caterham? What factors have led to mature men in their thirties kicking each other in the head and the expectation that fellow citizensshould just walk by? What example does that set to young boys half the age? What has happened to British society? Was it always like this? What can we do to change?